The Bullshit Olympics

With 60% of one prize's winning stories flagged as AI, is it time to throw in the towel?

Photo by Smithsonian on Unsplash

♥️ If you love real human writers who are still trying to scratch a living out of their words, and you would like them to thrive, rather than cheating, lying bastards, please take a second to heart this post. ♥️

We’re rolling in bullshit. Have you ever owned a dog who loved to roll in the stinkiest thing they could find? Fox poo, rotten fish, a cow pat? They do it to mask their own smell.

Online, the smell of reality’s growing fainter. We’ve been rolling in bullshit for quite a few years: bullshit of all kinds. ‘Fake news!’ said the biggest pathological liar to ever hold office in the Western World, as the Information Age slid into the prefix ‘Mis-’. Then a couple of years ago, AI stepped into the ring.

Now we’re so thoroughly caked in bullshit that most of us can’t smell reality. What to believe? Should we just believe nothing? We cry ‘AI!’ at things that are true. Would the US bomb a schoolhouse of girls? The world’s leading deepfake expert, defeated by the slew of ever-more-believable lies and unbelievable truths, has thrown in the towel.

Videos, photos, text. AI writing is slick and flawless. AI-generated posts get thousands of likes; most people can’t tell, or don’t care. I see ‘beautifully written! You should be a writer!’ under AI-generated comments on Facebook. I start watching a viral Instagram reel whose message (women are the stronger sex) is tailored to cater to my tastes… and recognise a few seconds in, it’s an AI script. Does that make it bad, when the mission is positive? When a standard flawed human could never come up with something so tightly argued and rhetorically persuasive?

Still, I can’t bring myself to light the ‘like’. Because I know something real, from a human desperate to feel heard and seen, got squashed by the algorithm to make way for this attention-friendly script. Because I fear I am quickly becoming one of those humans.

The CEO of Barnes & Noble, James Daunt, says he’s happy to stock AI-generated books. Take a Break magazine has stopped paying writers for short fiction; all its future stories will be generated in-house by AI. As the landscape for writers who actually write becomes tougher and thinner, I chose to believe one thing might remain fully human. Literary fiction. The glittery land with the prizes where my feet have touched down once or twice.

But it seems I was wrong.

As soon as Jamir Nazir’s story ‘The Serpent in the Grove’ won the Caribbean category of the Commonwealth Short Story Prize and was published in Granta, the rumbling began. The story was peppered with well-known AI constructions and phrases. Was that the sound of half a ton of literary bullshit being tipped out of an AI tipper truck? Could ChatGPT have written those deep-sounding-yet-puddle-shallow similes? Was it an LLM, primed to write in high literary style, which declared “She had the kind of walking that made benches become men”?

Nobody knew. It’s easy to accuse, hard to prove. The AI-detection software, Pangram, said it was 100% AI. They ran all the winners since 2012 through the software. AI was detected in zero winning stories until 2025, when one regional winner was flagged. This year, three of the five regional winners were flagged as AI.

This was not enough to strip Nazir of the prize. Pangram does throw up false positives. There were other grounds for suspicion. Nazir, 62, was unknown in local writing circles, which is unusual. You rarely get good enough to win a prize like this in isolation. As an aspiring writer, undertaking such a solitary craft, you tend to crave community: feedback, validation, opportunities to read, shared workshops. Usually, one or two other writers close by will know you as a writer. But okay, let’s say you’re Emily Dickinson (and boy would her m-dash use get her flagged!). You have a health condition (he has at least two), and you barely leave your house. He could be that absolute outlier, the unknown, solitary genius writer catapulted from nowhere into the limelight.

Granta was unnerved enough by the accusations to withdraw, permanently, from its relationship with the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, and its commitment to publish the regional winners. Writers everywhere lose.

Nazir went on to win the overall prize, netting himself £7,500. You can see why you might — why anyone might — want to cheat. But of course we can’t prove that Nazir used AI. The Commonwealth Foundation held ‘detailed discussions’ with the regional winners and declared itself satisfied.

But in my honest opinion, there is definitely something fishy. And that beached corpse of conger eel stinking up the scene (looking so much like a serpent) can be detected by any good bullshit detector in the words of Nazir himself. (Apologies for the mixed olfactory metaphor). The genius here is Will Oremus, who interviewed Nazir for The Atlantic.

Let’s just say this. If bullshitting were an Olympic sport, ChatGPT would win silver, and Claude would win gold. But Jamir Nazir? I doubt he’d even get through to the regionals. Because the point of bullshit is to be convincing. To mask your own stink. To come up, if you can, smelling like roses. Will Oremus sows the first seeds of doubt in his preface:

On several occasions, he seemed to avoid answering my questions directly; when he did, some of the answers were circuitous. I was surprised to hear him opine that AI-generated writing will soon be widely accepted in literature, even as he maintained that he didn’t use AI tools in creating his story. He seemed bullish on AI overall, viewing it as a revolutionary technology, though he worried about the repercussions of saying so.

Bullish, or bullshittish. You decide. I’ve spoken to thousands of writers, read hundreds of interviews, and one thing I know. When you ask a writer about their favourite writers, they usually have quite a lot to say. And they won’t necessarily name the most obvious names.

Oremus: You’ve talked about how the unusual writing style in “The Serpent in the Grove” stemmed from your love of poetry. Who are a couple of your favorite poets who have inspired you?

Nazir: The first one whose poetry I fell in love with was a guy known as Pablo Neruda from Chile. And his teacher or mentor was a lady known as Gabriela Mistral. Both of them had a profound impact on me. Then there is Derek Walcott, a Caribbean poet who, like Pablo Neruda, is a Nobel Prize winner.

I like the way he named Pablo Neruda, an exceptionally famous poet, as though the Atlantic guy wouldn’t have heard of him. I’ll give him points for Gabriela Mistral, but what he says about them both having a ‘profound impact’ is awfully bland. Derek Walcott also gives us very little, being the most obvious poet for a Caribbean writer to name. Which leads us on to my favourite part of the interview:

Oremus: You had mentioned some of your inspirations earlier, including Walcott and Neruda. What’s your favorite Walcott work?

Nazir: Walcott has a lot of Caribbean poems, right? And I cannot—there are several, and they talk about the destruction of a village because of the sea. And I wrote something like that. It’s quite a change. And I am advertising a little bit, but I have a collection that I have written, my Caribbean collection, sort of Walcott-style. I tried to edit it as much myself as I could, and it’s ready for publication. So hopefully this award will give me the platform to publish this.

Oremus: But do you have a favorite of Walcott’s poems?

Nazir: A story of Walcott’s?

Oremus: Yeah.

Nazir: To be honest with you, I can’t think of a specific favorite right now. I am getting a little bit of brain fog in recall. I had an excellent memory, and now it haunts me because at times I can’t remember even basic stuff. I think it’s a part of the condition, the illness. And I’m on chemotherapy as well. So that is a hard thing.

The poor man! It’s really shitty having two serious illnesses. Especially when one of them makes you think that Derek Walcott wrote stories. I mean, given how useful Nazir says he finds AI for research, you’d think he could have done some.

AI, did Derek Walcott write stories?

I mean, that brain fog must be really, REALLY bad.

I don’t want to get dragged into a defamation suit again, so let’s just say that “alleged” AI author Jamir Nazir’s interview is not a masterclass in lying.

It remains to be seen whether someone can lie and cheat their way into literary splendour rather than literary infamy. I’m guessing a sociopath could manage it, but Jamir Nazir is not a sociopath. He’s an ordinary fallible human being.

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Over to you

If you’ve scrolled down this far, I’d love to hear what you think about the Atlantic interview with Jamir Nazir.

• Is it a damning detail that your ‘favourite writer’ didn’t write stories, or do you give the guy a pass because he (allegedly) has brain fog?

• Do you care whether a story is written by a human or not, if you enjoy the story?

• Should all literary prize entries be passed through Pangram before being considered by judges?

• Must we all now keep timestamped documents so as not to be accused of AI writing?

• Or could timestamped documents also be faked? (I’m thinking by someone techie, why not? Just ask Claude how to do it, surely.)

• Do we stand any chance against this onslaught once the sociopaths get wind of easy money for a few apt prompts?

• Boy, I have way too many questions. What about you?